


Space Family Vacation

by Paycheckgurl



Category: Disney - All Media Types, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Universal Studios - Fandom
Genre: Amusement Parks, Audio link in the text, Disney, Disney References, Disney Songs, Disney World & Disneyland, ET - Freeform, Earth based, Family, Family Bonding, Family Vacation, Florida, Gen, Orlando - Freeform, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 11, Post-Season/Series 12, Robot family, Space family, Theme Parks, Transformers - Freeform, Universal Studios, caps and bold, filming rides is not actually allowed so yeah sorry cambot, i warned for it's a small world right?, it's a small world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-05-07 16:04:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14674581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paycheckgurl/pseuds/Paycheckgurl
Summary: A series of connected stories featuring The Space Family Vacation to the The Most Magical Place on Earth (and also Universal Studios).





	1. It's a Small World

**Author's Note:**

> This is super self indulgent, to absurd levels for a number of reasons. 
> 
> Inspired heavily by the (sadly defunct from the look of it) MST3K headcanon blog on Tumblr which can be found here
> 
> And by the the-technicolor-whiscash's Splash Mountain [fan art](https://the-technicolor-whiscash.tumblr.com/post/171819316007/i-know-its-been-a-while-since-ive-done-any-art)
> 
> Important Note: For the full effect please click the link in the middle of this chapter.

**Walt Disney World: The Magic Kingdom**  

“But I want to ride my favorite ride!” whined Crow.

“Who in the right mind’s favorite ride is…”

Jonah put a large hand over Tom’s beak to interrupt that statement.

“Look, Crow I already told you I have a headache,” said Mike. “As much I’d _love_ to have that song looping infinitely in my head and a bunch of dead eyed dolls staring at me…”

“Does no one else care about peace and togetherness?”

“That’s what EPCOT is for,” said Tom.

“And they have booze,” said Mike.

“Jooooooooeeeeeeelllllllll,” whined Crow. “No one wants to do what I wanna do!”

“I don’t want to ride it either,” mumbled Joel. It’d been a long day. And that ride was just inherently creepy. The dolls just stared at you the entire way through. To say nothing of the colors that looked like they came out of a bad trip.

Jonah sighed. “Come on Crow, let’s ride.”

Cambot excitedly followed.

“You too buddy?”

Cambot nodded their body.

“Hah! Jonah’s my new favorite!”

Jonah positively beamed despite looking like he was making an effort not to. Mike looked affronted.

Joel sighed. “Don’t worry, that’ll last about five minutes before Crow starts giving him a hard time again.”

As the boat took off, the two humans and Tom Servo watched from the viewing window in Phonocatos Haus quick serve restaurant. They sent a quick text to Jonah letting them know where to meet, and then watched it disappear down the bend. Gypsum appeared with trays of everyone’s lunch order—plus two orders of burgers and fries each set aside for Crow and Jonah. They ate their lunch in relative peace, unaware they’d missed the boat come back around.

“It’s still kind of loud in here,” said Mike, as he picked at a flatbread. 

“Yeah,” said Joel. “but just be thankful we’re not getting subjected to...”

 

**[IT’S A WORLD OF LAUGHTER, A WORLD OF TEARS](https://open.spotify.com/user/zzsxr9sjona9lnzqz5vrmjadk/playlist/5Ljh1GhRQ1xnZqqXHjLcaD) **

**IT’S A WORLD OF HOPE AND A WORLD OF FEAR**

**THERE’S SO MUCH THAT WE SHARE**

**THAT IT’S TIME WE’RE AWARE**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD**

**THERE IS JUST ONE MOON AND ONE GOLDEN SUN**

**AND THE SMILE MEANS FRIENDSHIP TO EVERYONE**

**THOUGH THE MOUNTAINS DIVIDE**

**AND THE OCEANS ARE WIDE**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD**

 

Mike positively jumped and his food tray went everywhere, some pizza spilled in his lap.

Cambot, the source of that, proudly showed their projection of the ride on the wall beside table.

“Please stop,” begged Joel in his deadpan. Cambot had zoomed in on the of the doll’s eye for good measure at the most repetitive part of the loop.

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

**IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL**

The next image was not of a creepy doll, but of Jonah looking like he was being tortured, and of Crow enjoying it entirely too much, even humming along.

“Oh yay lunch!” Said Crow. He then plucked a slice of flatbread pizza from Mike’s lap. “Jonah, can we go again after this?”

Jonah slumped onto the table, and Cambot triumphantly reached the lyric “ **IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD** ” again in his recording, which happened to coincide with another run of footage of the Jonah from several minutes ago looking tortured.

In the present, Crow sang along to the recording. 


	2. Matching T-Shirts

**Minneapolis, Minnesota**

“So we’re agreed—matching TV shirts,” said Joel.

“An important part of the Disney World experience,” agreed Tom.

“Well what do we put on them?” asked Gypsum.

Jonah stared up at the ceiling thoughtfully pondering that.

“We can use my old T-Shirts!” declared Crow.

“Those survived the first Satellite crash?” asked Mike.

“Forget that, 1997 called and they want them back,” said Tom.

“Yeah well 1997 called and they want that joke back!” cried Crow. 

“Yeah well 1997 left a voicemail this time and they want that comeback back!” 

“Guys, guys, guys,” said Jonah. “Let’s just use a T-Shirt template.”

Mike squinted at the computer screen. “Here’s one from Etsy. It’s says ‘the [Your Name Here] Family Reunion’ and has the year on it.”

“I mean I guess in a way it is kind of a reunion,” said Gypsum. “We were in space. And now we’re all back home. Plus this trip is being financed from what’s basically hush money from Gizmonic over what happened...”

”It’s definitely a family reunion,” declared Joel confidently. 

“What do we put as the family name though?” asked Servo. “I mean Robinson-Nelson-Heston-Servo-Robot might not actually fit on the shirt given the font…” 

“Mike…are you actually trying to get Robinson-Nelson-Heston-Servo-Robot to fit on a shirt?” said Crow.

Mike was furiously hitting backspacing. The cursor left a giant blank space. The computer began to freeze, and Mike frantically started hitting “refresh” and pounding on the mouse.

“Ummm, I think I accidentally just ordered 20 of the shirt,” mumbled Mike.

“What does it say?” asked Joel.

Mike looked at the screen. “Nothing. There’s just a blank space where the family name should go.”

To be fair, it wasn’t actually Mike’s fault that the vendor interpreted the blank space as literally the word “space” written out. Or that they hadn’t messaged him to double check that’s what they wanted. But in the end, it actually worked out.

“Space Family,” said Joel with a glitter of pride behind his sleepy smile. “You know, I kind of like the sound of that.”

And so the Space Family was off.


	3. Rain Day

 

**Orlando, FL: International Drive**

“It’s Florida’s rainy season, it rains everyday...it’ll just stop in an hour like it always does,” said Servo in a mocking, mimicking tone. “So I don’t know if you noticed but it’s still raining, thundering and lightening even, and it hasn’t stopped. For hours.”

Joel and Jonah were both ignoring him, and eyeing the hotel phone in a worrying way. Mike may have been responsible for breaking the coffee machine with his klutziness (he actually wasn’t, the thing just broke when he barely touched it, as he kept asserting everytime it was brought up), but he wasn’t knowingly going to let the Gizmonic duo break a perfectly good hotel phone in a fit of restlessness. You could order room service on that thing!

“Since we’re stuck inside from the rain why don’t we explore some of the indoor attractions today.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth wasting a park ticket to do stuff only inside…” began Gypsum.

“Then let’s check out stuff in Orlando. There’s other attractions, right? How about the upside building? Or the weird sunken building? Or the pirate ship? _Anything_.”

If he didn’t pull the two humans out of the room soon they’d be buying park tickets for a brand new robot by the end of the day. And that was before Crow and Servo decided on whatever mischief they wanted to get up to.  

Five minutes later Mike had run to the lobby and gotten some colorful pamphlets. The sunken building was a Ripley’s Believe It or Not themed to look like it had fallen victim to a sink hole. Cool, but they had a Ripley’s in Minnesota. Getting everyone to go might have been a hard sell if they thought they’d basically seen it already.

There were escape rooms, but he didn’t trust the bots not to break everything in an attempt to break out of one. And well, willingly getting locked up my evil scientists (even fake actor ones), wasn’t exactly on the agenda.  

The _Titanic_ artifact exhibit sounded like mostly prop reproductions. And while it might have held Jonah’s interest, and maybe Joel’s for at least an hour or two, it’d still leave the bots restless. So that was out.

The pirate thing was dinner theater. Which would be great at holding everyone’s attention—it’d either be silly fun or cross into riff worthy, but either way they’d get something out of it. If it weren’t for the _dinner_ part of that. The showtimes were at seven. He needed a distraction _now._

The building themed to look completely upside down was called Wonderworks and was basically a science museum with a laser tag inside. Alright. Laser tag. Science. He could pull the nerds away from the room with the lure of edutainment and pull the bots in with the lure of war games. There was even a separately ticketed magic show that night—close up magic. Perfect. And then no one was dismantling an overpriced hotel room.

“We’re going to Wonderworks!” declared Mike.  

After successfully managing to stop two grown men from playing with dangerous electrical wires (Mike did not care that they ostensibly knew what they were doing), and stopping the bots from handling mysteriously acquired rubber chickens (he really didn’t want to know), they made their way to a peculiar (and blatantly touristy) upside down building. And over two hundred dollars on his credit card later (cheap by Orlando standards considering the number of them), Mike had successfully scored the day’s diversion.

“Oh hey!” shouted Gypsum. “The rain stopped!”

“Let’s go to the parks! I wanna ride Tower of Terror!” said Crow.

Mike face palmed. “No, we are going to the weird quasi-educational tourist trap and you are going to like it!”

“But—“

“Go play indoors. Now.”


	4. ET

**Universal Studios Florida**

“ET is a charming ride! It’s a classic ride! There’s all those show sets and that gorgeous que...”

Joel was going on about the ET ride again. Nestled into a forgotten corner of the park, the last opening day ride of Universal Studios sat, well proudly wasn’t quite the right word. Stubbornly. Stubbornly was better.

“The gorgeous que that smells like a bad pine air freshener and hard plastic. And the plastic trees are creepy,” said Mike. “Isn’t there some kind of sick irony in plastic trees?”

“It’s a theme park, what do you want real trees?” asked Joel.

“Animal Kingdom has real trees!”

“It also has one big fake tree made out of an oil rig. And the que smells great I really don’t know what you’re going on about. Like a nostalgic forrest. Look, I really don’t know what your problem is with ET. But if you don’t want to…”

Mike groaned. He hated the ride. The old animontrics smelled like hard plastic (because they were). The water smelled disgusting and off. Like it was over chlorinated, but also somehow not quite chlorine (but distinct from Disney’s not-chlorine smell). Which raised all sorts of questions about why this ride felt the need have a water scene in the first place. It had an unfortunate tendency to break down in front of the creepy, smelly animontrics and overpoweringly smelly water. All of that was before the godforsaken plot of the thing.

The plot of the ride was nonsense that involved ET actually being alien Jesus that needed to return to his home planet and use his magic alien Jesus powers to stop a mysterious plague and save his weird alien friends.

Mike had more than enough weird aliens his life.

Also the weird alien friends spoke in perfect English but ET couldn’t. What was that about?

But Joel really liked the ride. And it was one of the few rides in this park Tom Servo was actually allowed on despite his height without cheating. And this trip was about spending more time together with them…

“You’re right, I’m being dumb. Let’s ride ET.”

They made their way through the que and gave the employee their names when prompted. “Rowdowser, Trumpy, Richard Baseheart, Crabby, Big McLarge Huge, Cambot, and Joel”—naturally Joel was the only one to actually give his real name, and provided Cambot’s.

The ride was...well it was ET. The practical models were kind of cool at least, even if they did look incredibly cheap compared to newer rides.

Mike maintained that it wasn’t all that great. But he took one look over at Joel’s face across the “flying bike” ride vehicle, and could tell that he was absolutely loving every minute of it. Jonah had clearly been sizing up the antromintrics and the models, grinning widely as his effects geek side shone through. Tom and Crow were probably over exaggerating their sense of whimsy for the sake of being ironic (he definitely heard them shout “look ET can do stupid things!” and “this is just a ‘Pod People Rip Off”, loud enough that the ride vehicle behind them probably heard). But ironically or not, they were still obviously enjoying it.

At the end when ET repeated their fake names back in a gurgled fashion (well some of their names, most of them probably weren’t pre-programmed in, or the employee recognized a joke when they saw one and didn’t want to give other tourists ammunition to keep it up), he saw Joel’s pleased little smile again. And well, in the end that was the point of a family vacation, right? Being happy with each other in the end.

That said, Mike was not going to ride again even if he was dragged, but the point still stood.


	5. Transformers

**Universal Studios Florida**

No one present actually liked the Michael Bay Transformers movies. They were dull CGI fest that while completely ridiculous and full of moments like robots peeing on people, were so poorly paced and composed you couldn’t even keep track of what you just watched. Tom and Crow had called it a “robotic smear campaign.” Truthfully, films they’d watched as torture had been about on par with it.

That said, they were all in on the Transformer Ride. Putting a bad movie franchise into ride form instantly made it cooler. That is, until it broke down.

“Well, the one thing we can say about Universal is that they don’t market themselves as the very definition of magic,” said Joel. “So when stuff like this happens you don’t have unrealistic expectations.”

“You mean the ride is just a screen!” shouted Crow. “What kind of lying, liars that lie are these people? I thought we were saving the mcguffin-spark from the bad robots with the help of the good robots and the US military!”

“Decepticons and Autobots,” corrected Jonah. “Also...I’m slightly concerned that I don’t if you’re kidding or not.”

“Of course I know about the Decepticons and Autobots Jonah, we were just helping them save the world! Or we were until we learned that Universal sells lies packaged like rides! Next you’re going to tell me we didn’t help Spider-Man save New York earlier!”

“I take it back,” said Joel. “Please no one tell him about Mickey Mouse.” 

Jonah hit his hand against his head.

“What about Mickey Mouse?” asked Tom. Crow had the looser grip on the concept of separating fiction from reality, but Tom was the more bright eyed one (metaphorically speaking), so of course he also didn’t know what Joel was referring to. “Does Disney have some secret about how he got from the parade to the meet and greet so quickly?” asked Tom. “Because I know it’s magic but I have some temporal theories about that.”

“Hush child,” said Joel. “Don’t worry about the science facts behind magic.”

Mike meanwhile, had decided to pull out Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure out of his backpack and use the lull for some reading time. The British tourists sitting in front of him turned around and shot him an amused look.

“Does everyone in America carry around Shakespeare with them at theme parks?” asked their wide eyed daughter, who was about nine.

“No, most carry around Emily Dickinson, I just like going against the grain,” said Mike.

The little girl looked mystified.

Mike shot her a crooked smile, and continued to leaf through his book. 

The announcement came on that they were going to get going. And then they didn’t. And then the lights came on. They completed the ride with the lights on and were given a fast pass for the ride of their choosing.

“We could always just ride Spider-Man again,” said Joel. “It’s pretty much the same ride but with Stan Lee cameos.”

“Um Harry Potter Joel! Let’s ride the Hogwarts express!” exclaimed Crow.

“Yes let’s!!!” declared Tom.

“That’s park to park transportation, not technically a ride we can use this for I think…” said Jonah.

“Um then we do the rest of Harry Potter! To Hogsmeade!”

“So long as we don’t break down in front of a Dementor on a stick this time,” said Mike as they trotted along. Tom’s Ravenclaw scarf flapped up and down as they did so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mike randomly reading obscure Shakespeare on Transformers while broken down is directly inspired by my friend who has did...pretty much exactly that once (she had it in her bag because she was learning lines and decided “Well might as well be productive, we’re stuck here anyways).” 
> 
> I realize this is pretty Universal heavy at this point, but one Potter chapter later and it’ll bounce back to being very Disney centric.


End file.
